Somebody told me recently that
I should write a poem for myself,

They do not know that I have left a piece of me
inside of you, and I have left you in every poem

previous to this——
but that is beside the point. For now

I imagine you are standing at a kitchen
counter chopping olives in half so you can

swallow them without chewing.
I am sitting in my living room considering

what it would be like to stick my face
into a blizzard, feel flakes of me parting

in the pursuit of snow.
I am considering fragility——

beauty in decomposition.
The way my limbs would fall off and roll

underneath the coffee table.
I am considering

the ways I have been reached
for. I am considering

the ways I have been swallowed
whole. Like the olives,

I imagine myself as dark and rounded,
filled with pimentos and a habitual feeling

of a cutting board below me and
a paring knife above. It is in this moment

of entirety before the wound that I
take a moment to consider this impracticality:

serene, my hands to my sides——this is the way I lie
before you. I’m rabid, walking calmly towards a gun.

I am eager, and I am adulterated in this.
When all is said and done,

when I sit in the pit of your stomach waiting
to dissolve, it is in you that I will leave this poem

for myself. It is through this dissolution
that I will become whole.